If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

ATI R600g Gains Mip-Map, Face Culling Support

07-30-2010, 09:00 AM

Phoronix: ATI R600g Gains Mip-Map, Face Culling Support

It was just one week ago that the R600g driver that is to provide open-source Gallium3D support to ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 (R600/700) graphics cards didn't do much as it's shader compiler was far from complete. However, after the author of this driver, Jerome Glisse, embarked on a new strategy, the the glxgears milestone was quickly hit...

So, currently, there is a simple TGSI -> r600 assembler mapper, which might soon be replaced by the r600c shader compiler or some variation of the r300g shader compiler as an interim solution, and in the long run Jerome's original r600 compiler should become operable, superseding them all?

Comment

Dear Bridgeman, AMD. The foss driver is progressing FAR from fast. Its like you have opensource driver just for hobbysts and care much more about closed sourced blob. Why on earth? So you do want closed source to exist and exist as primary high perfomance? When you are little different from NVidia. I feel like I did stupid thing changing. I hoped I see a company that believes in FOSS just like HP does.

Comment

Dear Bridgeman, AMD. The foss driver is progressing FAR from fast. Its like you have opensource driver just for hobbysts and care much more about closed sourced blob. Why on earth? So you do want closed source to exist and exist as primary high perfomance? When you are little different from NVidia. I feel like I did stupid thing changing. I hoped I see a company that believes in FOSS just like HP does.

C'mon be fair, they never stated that they (read AMD) will do the job.
In case I,m wrong, point me to where they did.

It was all about releasing the docs containing the interface specifications.
Now they even provide some programming examples and most developers are paid by AMD.
All they promised was to provide the docs so that independent programmers can jump on.
Currently, it's only Marek and Corbin, afaik.

Comment

Dear Bridgeman, AMD. The foss driver is progressing FAR from fast. Its like you have opensource driver just for hobbysts and care much more about closed sourced blob. Why on earth? So you do want closed source to exist and exist as primary high perfomance? When you are little different from NVidia. I feel like I did stupid thing changing. I hoped I see a company that believes in FOSS just like HP does.

If AMD is like nVidia (and vice versa) - where can I get .pdf register and programming docs for Fermi? (/me waits)

Comment

C'mon be fair, they never stated that they (read AMD) will do the job.
In case I,m wrong, point me to where they did.

It was all about releasing the docs containing the interface specifications.
Now they even provide some programming examples and most developers are paid by AMD.
All they promised was to provide the docs so that independent programmers can jump on.
Currently, it's only Marek and Corbin, afaik.

I would still very appreciate at least ONE GPU vendor to stand beind opensource, like HP did.

I recently was in need of a printer, went to store and some selling guy: Hey, Kodak is best bet, most economical and costs very ok. / Does it support linux? / Yes. / Really? / Yes, Im sure.

It did NOT. So next day TWO kodak printers were taken back for refund.

Then I have spend a bit more time and found out that only HP support linux well. I go and buy TWO B209A from HP. I plug them into my linux box, emerge CUPS(Gentoo guy) and Hoila! On another box, with Debian I apt-get CUPS and hoila! 300$ just for linux opensource support. I dont regret them. Others DID NOT become them, because they REFUSE. They can continue refuse, I DONT CARE.

Comment

I would still very appreciate at least ONE GPU vendor to stand beind opensource, like HP did.

I recently was in need of a printer, went to store and some selling guy: Hey, Kodak is best bet, most economical and costs very ok. / Does it support linux? / Yes. / Really? / Yes, Im sure.

It did NOT. So next day TWO kodak printers were taken back for refund.

Then I have spend a bit more time and found out that only HP support linux well. I go and buy TWO B209A from HP. I plug them into my linux box, emerge CUPS(Gentoo guy) and Hoila! On another box, with Debian I apt-get CUPS and hoila! 300$ just for linux opensource support. I dont regret them. Others DID NOT become them, because they REFUSE. They can continue refuse, I DONT CARE.

I hope you understand my point? As a customer that cares, as well.

No linux support? Bye bye, stay on shelf for virus users.

Thing is printer isn't as complex as a gpu you would need one engineer (even not full time) to do CUPS backend (if it's how it's done, i am quite unfamiliar with printing system).

For a GPU you need a bigger team, lot bigger, i am not sure how many software engineer works on the closed source driver but i think a fair guess is around several hundred. So doing GPU driver is a lot of investment, while i am sure AMD believe in open source, i don't think they have any sensible reason to devote any more money to open source GPU driver. I hope it will be different at some point in the future. I too wish we have solid open source GPU driver (like GL 4 and all cool stuff) but now we are just playing catchup, i hope to have time to devote to push forward GL3 and then GL4 support once gallium driver is more mature (good news is that we should be able to leverage lot of the work we are doing now for bringing up future GPU).